Another Post About Trans Stuff
I often feel like this comes off as so much whining, but to explain where I’m coming from, what’s happening in my head, I need to keep saying it: I am having a lot of difficulty transitioning with this blog. I am always having those difficulties – this thing is an ever-changing beast. Now that I’m making an effort to adjust myself rather than adjust my blog, I’m getting some valuable perspective on some shit what’s gone on here. Specifically, I’ve got a better idea of what was going on with me when I bungled this post.
See, the other day, I had the singularly exciting opportunity to see my blog come up as a suggested feed for me in my RSS. “Harriet!” my RSS says, “You might enjoy these blog articles by Harriet!” Well, yes, I agree! Checking it out, I saw just how many people are subscribed. It didn’t seem like an objectively large number (though it still tickled me pink), but then, on a whim, I ran it against the subscribers on some of the other feminist blogs I read. You know, the ones I consider to be “real” blogs, with real writers, real readership, real effect on the blogosphere. And I was blowing most of them out of the water.
These are blogs I consider important. Worthwhile. These are the blogs that have helped create the bulk of my post-college feminist theory. When I want to give a friend Feminism 101, I refer them to these articles, these writers. These are my academics, the people that I consider to be out there, doing real things, making real changes. I don’t feel that way about myself. Not because I don’t value my abilities enough (though that’s also true), but because I value their abilities so much. These are people who have put far more dedication, passion, and just plain old fucking work into their little piece of the good fight; I know I’ve got raw writing talent, but in my mind, I just shlubbed onto the scene, said, “What’s up guys, let’s talk about me for a while,” then fell over backwards into some butterscotch fame.
I didn’t start this blog to be a feminist mouthpiece. I didn’t start it to fight the good fight. I didn’t start this blog to create anything other than a safe space for me to go “BLAH BLAH BLAH” all day. As my blog started getting popular, people started commenting and emailing me, telling me that I was all these things I had never wanted or asked to be. I was a voice for others. I was putting out little ripples of good. I’ve really resisted giving in to that. Whatever others are finding to value in my voice, that’s only coming from my ability to speak freely and for myself. I don’t know how to speak for others, or stake a claim outside my body and defend it. I freeze up. I do poorly. I get red-faced and talk for hours and don’t say anything. I don’t want to be anybody’s Internet role model. That’s too much responsibility, too much obligation, too much that hems me in. I should be able to just have a blog and talk about what I want, and everybody should just realize that they can’t expect anything else out of me. Just because other people look up to me doesn’t mean I’m a role model.
The other day, I got into a fight with my boss, which is new to me. At my last job, I never raised a peep. But the dynamics here – though still pretty dysfunctional – are nowhere near abusive, and suddenly I’ve found myself opening my mouth and adamantly disagreeing, only later to wonder, “Who the fuck was that who just told off her boss? Holy shit, it couldn’t have been me.” Anyway, my boss and I were fighting about how to process a certain objective in the office. The way they’ve done it in the office, for years, has never worked, and costs an arm and a leg more than it should. I was arguing for another way, a way that requires much more administrative presence upfront, and much more managerial oversight, but will result in lots of savings. My boss was arguing for the old way, saying, “If we just tell people to do it this way, that should work.” And she was right – it should work. It would be the easiest and the best if it did work that way. But it has never worked yet, and it wasn’t working now, so I was arguing, “Whether it should work has no bearing on whether or not it does. And it doesn’t. So we can keep doing it wrong because it should work, or we can find a way that does work and do it right.”
Suddenly, I was thinking about my blog. I shouldn’t have to take responsibility for being a representative of somebody’s voice in the wilderness. That’s not what I created this space for, and that’s not what I wanted. I shouldn’t be expected to change my way of living because other people look up to me. Other people should realize that I am not a role model. That’s how it should be, but that’s not the way it’s working. So I can keep doing it the way it should be, and keep fucking some crucial things up, or I can find a way that works and do this right. Since I do have significant readership, disproportionate to how much I feel I deserve from the work I put in here, and since that (very likely) comes with readers who are looking to me to set a certain tone and standard, I have to start acting like the kind of person who deserves all that.
When the trans argument popped up initially, I could tell I was not handling myself well. I froze up. There was a lot going on there, and I really couldn’t separate any of it out: just one big teeming rubberband ball of privilege, confusion, ignorance, sudden comment moderation, social anxiety, and unspoken expectations about my blog. At that point, I was still really viewing Fugitivus as a livejournal. I did not think of myself as somebody in the class of big-name bloggers, somebody who was Doing Something About Feminism ‘N Stuff or generally accepting a role within a community. Not that feminism doesn’t become inherently personal at points, but I really felt that this space was purely personal. I was unable and unwilling to view myself through the perspective of my readers, who considered me something more than an online diary. So, people coming here to tell me, hey there, that thing you said is really douchey? Okay, fair enough – I can say douchey things and be called out on it, or I can not say douchey things, but I can’t say douchey things and expect nobody gets to call me a douche. But having people come in and argue that I need to change my tone, my thoughts, my blog, is based on a premise that my tone, thoughts, and blog are worth way more than I’m willing to believe. “You, personally, are saying shitty things,” is something I can deal with (with varying levels of success). “You are part of and responsible for a community, you set the tone, you create something larger than the sum of its parts with your work, and you have an obligation to do right by that,” was something I was not able to deal with.
So, rather than deal with the problem from Perspective 2, wherein my blog is meaningful and part of a wider discourse, I dealt with it from Perspective 1, where this is a personal problem. It was a big personal problem – running headfirst into a wall of privilege usually is – and I was wandering around in a daze for a while. I did what I usually do when I’m confused and unbalanced; I retreated. I added my cis privilege to the list of things to keep thinking about until it’s been untangled, and I have been doing that slowly and privately, in the safety of my own head. That’s how I handle personal issues that come up between me and another person. I apologize, I fix it if I can, and if I can’t, I promise to not forget, to keep thinking about ways to fix it, and then I take a really long, patient, quiet time to do this.
Which is all well and good for me personally, and for those who want to hang out with me. But this blog isn’t a personal thing anymore. If it ever really was, it was back in the days when I got five hits a day. Even the rules I’ve enacted on this blog are primarily personal rules. I conduct my comments the way I conduct my life, and I ban or delete the kind of shit I’m not willing to hear IRL. I give some passing thought to what other people might or might not want to hear, but I don’t think about this as a community, or a real place that I am responsible for. The bigger this has gotten, the more apparent it’s become that the personal approach isn’t enough anymore. This is bigger than me now, bigger than I could ever purposefully make it. I’m trying to wrap my head around all the big and little things that changes – like my definition of being a writer, being a success, or doing something with my life – and this just goes on the list.
Here’s the reason all this came up. I was reviewing a bunch of my link trackbacks. I get a fair amount, and about 50% are ending up in shitty, ugly places, forums that are all “ha ha she got raped” or “that isn’t racism, that’s just good sense,” etc. I’m not the kind of person who enjoys or is able to tolerate hanging out in enemy camp, so I do a lot of skimming to quickly determine if I’m at a generally feminist or anti-racist website, or at a place awash in pearl-clutching terror and historical fugue. If it’s generally feminist, I might skim a little harder, but usually not too much. Most places don’t have the very strict moderation that I have, and I don’t enjoy flamewars at all – some people do, and that’s okay, it’s just not for me. I usually skim just enough to pick up the gist of a conversation, but not get involved in anything that makes my blood pressure rise.
So, I find myself linked on what appears to be a generally feminist site. I’m skimming around to find where I’ve been mentioned, and it looks like I’m somewhere in the comments. The commenter has accompanied my link with something about how this is an example of how things go wrong, and since she’s linking to a post about rape, I assume she’s saying something about rape culture – that’s where I get most of my trackbacks. I scroll up to skim the original post, and it’s something vaguely feminist enough, about The Vagina Monologues. I skimmed even more vaguely because unpopular feminist confession: I don’t care for The Vagina Monologues. I think they’re pretty cool, but honestly, I just don’t like monologues. I see, in my skimming, that the poster is discussing trans women performing The Vagina Monologues. I’ve heard of this before, and I think it’s pretty neat. In the adoption world, I got used to referring to adopted or foster kids as having “complicated” relationships to family. It’s a generally value-neutral way to acknowledge the ways losing their first family has affected them, without neglecting to mention that these kids are perfectly capable of loving, being loved, and creating new families around them. It’s complicated. I like people who have “complicated” relationships to anything, because it usually means that they’ve spent a lot more time dissecting, analyzing, understanding, and seeking out these objects of their desire than anybody with a “normal” relationship. When I first heard that trans women were putting on The Vagina Monologues, I thought it was really going to add something to hear from women who have complicated relationships with vaginas. Not that cis women don’t, obviously, but like with foster or adopted kids, there are things trans women have to grieve and have to gain, things they lose and things they build, that cis women don’t necessarily ever have to confront.
Check out my privilege: I totally thought all the other feminists felt this way, so I didn’t skim very hard, and assumed this article was also, “Yay trans Vagina Monologues!”
I’ve always considered myself a feminist, but college is where I really learned all the ideological background and academics. And we had little trans units, here and there, where we all discussed how trans stuff just blew the fucking top off gender tropes, and that was the awesomest thing ever. It didn’t occur to me, at the time, that we were a bunch of cis women sitting around discussing how the existence of trans people was a useful ideological tool for our own agendas. There wasn’t any discussion of transfolk as, you know, real people, just discussions of what transfolk represented, and what that representation could do for us. What we learned, though very privileged, was still generally on a positive tone: our professors actively encouraged us to celebrate the gender diversity that transfolk brought into the world. We weren’t to consider transfolk as obstacles in the way of feminism’s rolling bus, or separate issues that would be dealt with once the revolution had come. But we weren’t taught to consider transfolk as folk – they were essay titles, intriguing theses, ideological termites, eating away at the patriarchy’s gendered framework and bringing us awesomely helpful pronouns in the meantime. Us being everybody else, because despite the general positivity and tolerance (rather than acceptance), transfolk were still clearly them.
I received my college education not more than four years ago, from a generally liberal field in a generally liberal school, so I assumed that I had been taught whatever the general liberal feminist beliefs at this time were. I mean, yeah, of course, we were also taught that unfeminist people were all trans-hating, and we were definitely taught about trans panic, about murders, about BATHROOM TERRORS, but those were all things that ordinary people did. Not feminists, not anymore. Those days? So behind us.
So, back to this blog. I skim the section on The Vagina Monologues, assuming it’s all “Yay trans women!”, because the world I live in is nice and easy like that. I skim through the comments and find some keywords that indicate a faptrot has begun – words like “always” and “never” and “all you people” and “censorship!” and “ruining our space.” So I figure, because my world is nice and easy, that some assholes came in and had a trans-terror, and all the usual commenters jumped in to start shouting them out. I go back to the comment area where I am mentioned to see where I fit in to all this. I read a comment that is about as shitty as I can imagine. Like, if I were writing a novel with a character called Stereotype McDouchington, this is what they would say about transfolk. Ah! I think. This must be the person causing all the trouble here. Let’s see how somebody jumps in to shut them down, yes yes, because that will be satisfying!
And as I keep reading, the comments keep coming. Things I couldn’t even imagine that people – that feminists! – were still saying, in this day and age, about transfolk. About anybody! On my blog, I wouldn’t let people talk about Ann Coulter that way, because it is So. Fucked. Up. I do not even want to repeat these things, because I read them enough, in the comments I delete, and they’re horrible and sickening. Of course, I expect those things in the comments I get – boys with the Hulk Rage come here to try and make me fear for my life, because my existence punches their privileged belly. I do not expect to read those things from feminists. I do not even expect to read those things from feminists talking about the unfeminist world, because I expect that feminists have a basic understanding (even if it’s a spotty application) of the concept that a rotten principle is a rotten principle. If it’s not okay for Defenders of the Patriarchy to advocate that you oughta get raped so you know what it’s like to be a real woman, then it’s not okay for you to advocate that the Defenders get raped in turn. Master’s tools, master’s house.
Check. Out. My. Privilege.
So I go back to the place I’ve been linked and read the comment more carefully. I am an example of how things go wrong. I am an example of a feminist discussion that was ruined – RUINED – by trans women. I am an example of a woman who was SILENCED. I am a reason why trans women need to sit down, shut up, and possibly do us all a favor and die, because Harriet over at Fugitivus was so oppressed by you.
Fuckin’ ouch.
I knew I didn’t handle myself well in that post that was linked. I knew I was making mistakes. I knew I was too ignorant to get it together, and that ignorance was a reflection of what I had, up till that point, considered important enough to learn about. But approaching it from a personal perspective, I allowed myself the privilege of taking a long and quiet time of reflection. I didn’t step forward quickly with an apology, I didn’t challenge some comments I should have, because I was busy thinking and not talking. And because this was all personal, there was nothing wrong with that.
But from the other perspective, where this is a community where I am the most powerful representative, I created a certain kind of atmosphere. It wasn’t, I hope, an atmosphere where questions couldn’t be asked, disagreements raised, or conversations had. But I did the thing that I loathe so much in other situations, though it always sounds like such a good idea: I refused to take sides. That seemed like a perfectly appropriate way to handle things when I’m talking about my personal space, and the time I need to work things out. There’s nothing appropriate about that in a public space, where the fucked members of the kyriarchy come to be safe. By refusing to take sides, by refusing to take a firm position, I created an image of myself that let a bigot identify with me. I created an event that other bigots can point to and say, “See? See how you’re ruining everything?” I can’t take responsibility for every bigot out there. People see what they want to see, and I have seen some of my posts go to really weird places, full of wild speculations and TimeCube logic. But I can’t honestly say that my actions here have been patently misinterpreted. I can see pretty clearly how they got from Point A to Point B, and I didn’t really offer anything up in between to derail that train.
I don’t have a good conclusion here. Things aren’t all different now, and I haven’t got a plan for how I’m going to fix this. I’m trying to educate myself more. I don’t know where that will lead. I’m still very uncomfortable talking about anything that isn’t cis, because I don’t think I have a right to assume I can be an authority on anything that isn’t cis. But there is a conversation I’ve been having over and over with some no-name bloggers I’m soliciting. I ask them what they want to write about, and they say, “I haven’t been raped, so obviously I can’t write about that.” Nobody has to write about rape here, but I don’t want to let that statement go by unchecked. So I tell them, you don’t have to be raped to be affected by rape. There are a thousand ways rape has limited or damaged your life, too, even if you’ve never known a rape victim. You live in the same pond the rape victims do, and you’re drinking the same water. You know what we’re thinking because you’ve thought it about us, about yourself, about others, because we all grew up with the same toxic thoughts about rapists and rape victims.
But I understand why the no-name bloggers believe this. I imagine my awareness sometimes like a big bubble surrounding me. The more I learn, the bigger my bubble gets, and new things end up inside, bouncing around. Inevitably, every time my bubble has expanded, the “new” thing that shows up turns out to be not so new at all. Before I became aware of the thing, I thought of it as something out there, independent, floating around in the World I Do Not Understand. After I become aware of the thing, I realize that it was actually another bubble, surrounding me and mine. Like a big failure of a Venn diagram. Suddenly, I can look through the keepsakes in my bubble and see all the different moments in my life that were touched by this “new” thing, because it was never new or different. It was always there, but unconnected, without a name. My new awareness is actually just a new name.
Intellectually, I understood a lot about rape before I was ever raped. Only afterwards did the personal start to reconnect itself, reform under this new name: This Is What Rape Looks Like, Harriet. I was able to see all these little times and places in my life that were a part of what I experienced, finally, at the hands of my husband. My life had been filled with rape, but I had been calling it jokes, drunk assholes, catcalls, bad sex, fear out of nowhere, self-injury, self-hatred, eating disorders, locker room conversations of “what did she expect?” Before I was raped, though, if you were to tell me, “You have lots to say about rape!” I would have parroted back some statistics I’d read. Certainly, I have no personal investment in this word, this concept. It exists out there, for the people who know something about it. All those moments in my life? They belong under different names.
So I’m trying to apply that to this. I’m cisgendered, and I don’t have any right to talk about a transgender experience. But I do have a right – and now an imperative – to talk about the ways in which strict gender roles have limited or damaged my life. These are things that have always fallen under the concept “Feminism,” but that’s a word that very obviously isn’t specific enough, because it’s a word that allows transphobic bigots to spread their wings. I need to find ways to understand, personally and politically, how my freedom rests on the freedom of transfolk, that these things cannot be divided. I know I have these experiences – I know many people have – and have just never believed that they had anything to do with transsexuals.
A brief example: at the start of junior high, my grandmother chopped all my hair off against my will. It’s a longer story than that, but to shorten it, I hadn’t really developed yet, and I was going into a new school and a new period of my life looking like a boy. Girls wouldn’t let me into the bathroom unless I stripped. Boys made gay sex jokes around me, and simulated anal rape in the halls. Teachers frequently called me by the wrong pronoun. People who knew my mother was a lesbian told me that must be why I thought I was a boy. None of this was helped by the fact that, in real life, I have a somewhat gender ambiguous name. I’ve often thought about those experiences under the umbrella of “feminism.” I surprised myself, considering this the other day, when I realized that I’d never thought about this when reading about trans issues. I’ve never read a news story about the Bathroom Panics and remembered being followed into stalls. I’ve never heard a transgendered person describe the personal pain it causes them when they’re called by the wrong pronoun and remembered what it was like to have shopkeepers address me as “little boy,” and then treat me with open hostility when I corrected them. I’m amazed at my lack of empathy with so much opportunity to connect. But this is why it’s important to call a thing by the proper name. It’s not just confusion, ignorance, or foolishly good intentions that kept me from pulling on my own experience. It’s bigotry. And it’s bigotry that feminism is still happily flirting with, bigotry that will cause future generations to call this a part of our dark age (if we’re lucky).
END OF SQUALID INTROSPECTION
Now a solicitation.
I am seeking a self-identified transgendered no-name blogger to make a post. Let me know if you’re interested!
Comments are closed.
I for one hope you keep it up. Your writing indeed rivals that of the other big feminist blogs. Also, this is yours, all yours. It can be as much or as little as YOU want it to be. Though I love this blog, I won’t die if it’s smaller (much smaller) than it is, and neither will anyone else. And I for one know you’re just a person, not the mouthpiece of the the feminist movement. Maybe you can put that at the top of the homepage or something.
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Posts like this are why I respect you as a person, if not why I’m glad you have this space here, and why I keep coming back to read it. Because you seem to have a really good handle on the fact that you’re never going to know it all, never going to be able to get it right all the time, never going to learn enough to expand that bubble you were talking about to cover everything tolerance-related [ew... I wish I had a better way to put that]. You’ll never get it all. But that’s not a stopping point for you, even when you refuse to take sides, eventually you’re going to sit down, and actually pick one.
And you’ll torture yourself over it, and you’ll dissect it, and you’ll drive yourself crazy about it, and even in the face of that ultimate failure you’ll keep at it. There are more things in heaven and earth, and be damned if you’re going to let that stop you.
Not that you really need the pat on the back and the “Good job, Harriet!” but it’s admirable, to be faced with something so complex that most people would give you a pass on it, and say to yourself “Nope, not good enough.” I don’t know if that’s why you have the number of subscribers you do, but it is why you have this one.
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Amazing piece. Lots of stuff going on and it gives me many things to think about. Thank you.
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Hi, I’m new to commenting around here. I discovered your blog about a year or so ago because WordPress thinks it’s similar to my blog, so you’d show up on my referrals list every so often. It wasn’t until relatively recently, however, that I started really following your blog.
And I am glad I did! This post is so refreshing to read, it makes me quite happy to see a cis person realize her privilege and show such openness to trans perspectives. It gives me hope.
I am not trans myself, but I am partnered to a trans woman. I have asked her if she would like to write a post for you, and she seems pretty receptive to the idea, though it seems that she has so many different trans subjects to write about that she is not sure what to write. Is there any particular topic you would like to feature?
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I had a ton to say about the fight against privilege, but I didn’t want to clog up your excellent comment section with somewhat off-topic remarks. If you’d like to see it, I’ve posted it here. (Blogger doesn’t do trackbacks, apparently.)
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Thanks for this. I think a lot of people go down that road, thinking “it’s not for me to comment, because it’s not my issue”, failing to realize that it’s never okay to remain silent in the face of the oppression of others, and that often all we need to do to empathize is to listen.
FWIW, I’m certainly a no-name blogger (somewhat by definition, given the handle I post under). I’m not sure what kind of post you’re looking for from a no-name blogger, but feel free to look over my blog to see if anything I’m saying resonates in any way.
(If you do want to check out where I’m coming from, you can check out my About Page and some of my posts like, I Don’t “Get It” Either and A Vagina Monologue.)
The truth is there are actually quite a lot of bloggers out there who are various shades of trans. I have a couple of posts about that, but you can find plenty by going to T Central.
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“No-name bloggers” is actually a section for people who don’t already have blogs of their own — I want to draw out new voices. But thanks for the links — I’ll check them out.
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The general themes I’ve identified as continually popping up on my blog are: feminism, rape, anti-racism, recovery, and loads of introspective meandering. Those aren’t the things that no-name bloggers have to write about, but I use those as general starting points when talking to the no-namers. Recovery, btw, is a very broad umbrella: recovery from abuse, recovery from depression, recovery from addiction — whatever a person feels they have recovered from works.
If she doesn’t feel like anything she has to say falls under those themes, that’s fine. Basically, whatever’s gnawing at her the most at any given time is good sauce.
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Off-Topic:
Harriet, I’m so sorry to you and everyone else to go off-topic in this thread, but I’m not sure how else to contact you. I’m about to submit a tee shirt to my local Clothesline Project and I’d like to know if I can quote a piece of your “Another post about rape” manifesto on my shirt (and give you credit, of course).
My favorite excerpt (at least one that might fit on a shirt) is:
For anybody who has ever watched a woman get browbeaten into accepting attention she doesn’t want…You told her that was okay, and necessary, and right.
Thanks,
gidget
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I can’t imagine what it’s like to be in your position–to have your private musings suddenly out there to be judged or held up for others to poke at, but I think you’ve handled it well. I don’t want to sound like I’m mindlessly adhering to every word that you say, but it really has been an awakening for me to read your blog, which acted as my gateway to the feminist blogosphere.
I know it sounds like a stupid comparison, but when I was in high school, I was one of four very outspoken students in my American history class. The teacher was liberal, the other three students were conservative, and I have a very middle-ground view of politics (mostly, I dislike them immensely and wish we could all realize that we’re all people who deserve to not be ignored in the political sphere). I’ve taken a position in the past that if I’m not educated on an issue, I shouldn’t speak on it, so I didn’t. And I realized that both the teacher and my classmates believed me to be on their respective sides on any issue that I didn’t speak up about. It was a strange moment where I realized that what you don’t say comes across as loud and clear as what you do say, it just may be interpreted differently by different people, and I’ve since tried to be more clear about my feelings in general.
I think that whoever linked your post to that blog was one of those who didn’t understand that while you were confused on the subject, you tried to be clear that you wanted to respect the boundaries and opinions of trans people before inserting your foot in your mouth any further. At least, that’s the sense that I got from it. But perhaps because I come from a similar place of privilege, I was able to read it that way.
Also, bigots seem to use anything that even vaguely represents their “cause” as ammo against their victims.
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I’m in agreement with all the others that have said that your introspection is what draws us to your site. You give voice our own fears, thoughts, hopes and dreams. You’re posts about rape and rape privledge have really opened my eyes to my own prejidices and I’ve become more outspoken about not only rape but other feminist issues. I find myself seeing my priviledge and having to realize that “it’s not all about me” as my therapist likes to remind me at times.
Don’t ever be afraid to be yourself. Yourself, warts and all, is pretty damn impressive.
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Ah, that makes a bit more sense. I just assumed that no-name meant non-A/B-list. There are a lot of people out there blogging with just a few readers and who are thereby largely invisible.
I’ll be interested to see how you do for takers. My gut feeling is that there are so many outlets for people to say what they want to say (it’s so easy to comment on someone else’s blog and only takes a few minutes set up your own) that I’m not sure how many unheard-but-eager-to-speak voices there are.
I set up my own blog only three months ago, after doing some commenting on a few blogs and deciding that I should have a centralized place of my own. When I began that, I looked around to see what other people in “the community” were saying, and found there were hundreds and hundreds of voices already talking. That initially gave me some doubt as to whether there would be anything I could add—and I still wonder if I’m going to quickly reach a point where I’ve said everything I really need to.
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I’m a recently single father of 2 girls, ages 6 & 2. The younger’s mother is a blogger I think you would read, find her here: http://thefeministagenda.blogspot.com/
I very much appreciate your burst of energies.
Tim
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Oh Toothfairy’s tits–why, why, WHY did I have to Google for sites linking to that earlier post? I just landed on that Vagina Monolgues rant and… Gods, I just want to cry. The cruelty. The entitlement. The complete and culpable ignorance. (Of course it doesn’t matter what I think about it, since I’m one of those 3rd-gender/androgyne weirdos & quite beyond the pale.)
I’m going to go and do something especially nice for a trans woman today.
Props to you for doing this BTW.
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TOTALLY! That’s awesome.
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I wasn’t going to link it to my post — I didn’t want to give them the exposure, or invite them all over here to give me a moderation nightmare, and I didn’t want people having your experience. But before I posted, I thought maybe I should Google it up again and re-read it, to make sure I had everything in context. I eventually decided against it, because as you’ve seen, it was so unbelievably fucked-up, I just didn’t think I could fucking do it.
Still good to have the confirmation that I didn’t somehow mis-read/skim the whole thing, that it was as bad as it made me feel.
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Well, it was a mishmash of words and actions. I said, “I want to know more about this before I comment further,” but then I didn’t make an active effort to learn more. I said, “I want to make this a space where people are free to disagree,” but then allowed a few comments that had a similar basic underlying principle to the ones I saw on the blog post that horrified me. I said, “I want to be respectful,” but then gave little to no response when people asked me to respect them. What I said doesn’t matter. What I said is all about my intentions. What I did is what matters, because I think what I did is what gave these other bloggers the feeling that their bigotry was appropriate and in line with feminism, and they had a home with me.
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I love your writing, Harriet. It kind of reminds me of the nuanced thoughtfulness of my favorite mainstream blogger, Ta-Nehisi Coates. You’re both so thorough and open, humble but passionate, interested and… well… .
But this post and the ones you made last year leading to it are so wonderful in laying out the dynamics of discussing privilege and how that privilege is so insidious. Thank you!
Anyway, of possibly negligible note, I’m a transwoman, but I’m still very much “in the closet” (and will be for a few more months), so I don’t know if I have any relevant experiences to share. I’m here, though, and I really wanted to express how glad I am that you’re here, too (in whatever capacity helps you do what you want to do).
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I realize I should have clarified more. Not everybody reads through every single post I make here, and the No-Name Bloggers thing was buried in an especially boring post about administrative stuff. No-Name Bloggers is a new feature I’m beta-testing, where I solicit posts from people who don’t have blogs, under the assumption that somebody with a blog already has a space to speak, and that the act of getting a blog already requires a leap of faith that you have something worthwhile to say. So, I’m trying to solicit posts from people who, for whatever reason, haven’t made that leap. That’s sort of a contradiction in terms — somebody who has chosen not to speak has chosen not to speak — but I strongly suspect that there are people out there who would speak with some encouragement, and I really want to hear from them.
I guess I started it because I would sometimes say to people, “You have really interesting things to say! You should start a blog!” and I’d get a, “Oh, no, I could never do that.” Then I’d say, “Well, make a guest post on my blog,” and get another, “Oh, no, you’re like a real blogger, with a real blog, I could never do that.” So finally I was like, “Fine! My blog now has a place that is for not real bloggers — like you! You can now make a blog post because, by definition of the space, you will not be a real blogger making a real blog post!”
You can read about it here, and you can see the first one here.
This is separate from guest posts, with named bloggers. That’s something I’m also interested in, but I’ve got a lot of different things I’m doing with the blog right now and am barely keeping up with those, so I’m trying not to overextend myself. Talking to other real bloggers is also going to make a big shift in the way this blog has previously run. I generally don’t link elsewhere, put up news stories, or interact on other blogs. I’ve purposefully stayed out of the blogosphere community, such as it is, because that’s a whole social nightmare that I do not know how to navigate. That’s part of what’s going to change here — I’m going to start branching out and trying to be a better member of the community — but I haven’t got there yet. Working with No-Name Bloggers is sort of a test drive for me. The majority of the people I’ve solicited right now are personal friends of mine, so they’re sort of training wheels — I get to see what it’s like to try and work collaboratively on something that is very important to me, and I get to do this first with people I know pretty well and trust pretty well. Named bloggers, in my mind, are people who feel strongly enough about their experiences to put that shit out in a very vulnerable place. I want to try and really develop my boundaries, needs, ideas, and beliefs before I step into the ring with other strong personalities with much more experience than I have, so I’m learning more about how to better express myself and be a good webmistress with the no-name bloggers.
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Oh no, you weren’t any tiny bit of over-reacting. That was a dreadful, dreadful bigotpile, rendered even more repellent by the fact that it’s all so achingly familiar. I sort of want to go over there and offer some kind of challenge (eg If a neovagina isn’t an organ then what about women who are born with blind vaginas, what about women who need reconstructive surgery, etc), but that would mean reading the whole thing again.
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PS: Thought I’d pass on this blog as an antidote to the hate + fail. “Aunty Sarah” is a UK blogger who writes rock climbing, married life and her experiences as a trans woman. She’s right-on + very cool.
http://auntysarah.dreamwidth.org/
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Can you link us to the feminist blogs that you consider important and worthwhile?
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Sure! Someday, eventually. They’re all in my reader, so I’ve got to pull them out and update my blogroll, which I’ve been saving for the blog update. So, someday!
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I’m a transwoman, but I’m still very much “in the closet” (and will be for a few more months), so I don’t know if I have any relevant experiences to share.
Being in the closet doesn’t negate your trans status or remove the privilege and bigotry of those around you (If it wasn’t for that privilege and bigotry, would you still be closeted?)
Nobody’s experiences are irrelevant, especially not when you’re part of the community being discussed.
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Hi Harriet!
Please excuse my lousy english and for my lack of proper terms, I´m not an academic in the gender field. I do hope you understand what I´m trying to say.
I liked this post. I do not normally read your blog, or other english-speaking feministblogg for that matter, but a friend of mine posted me the link.
Since I´m a gay guy, feminist, post-op FTM-transsexual and transactivist, I´m very well awere of the problem the transmovement have whith some very hostile women feminists (I never heard about men considered being feminist did act transphobic, but I assume they might exist too).
My opinion about this is that, as in all human-rights-movements, there are groups within the feminist movement who fell the urge for strengthen the movement or their own group/organisation by telling the world who they are by saying what they are not.
The reason for this behaviour and thoughts might be many I think. I suppose most of these reasons are hidden for both the whole group and often even for the leading person. On reason might be that they might in some way actually like the patriarchy, as being comfortable in being the victime in the genderhierarchy, without responsibilitys. It often strucks me that this analysis might fit into some (the minority I really do hope) radicalfeminist who like Sheila Jeffreys & co. Their fight do sometimes feel like a fight not for finding solutions for getting a more equal world, but more for to prove only what went wrong and how to compensate the women. ( Sometimes I will ask someone more well-educated in gender theory and feminism than me to explain whats the difference betwen these feminists and the biologist feminists. It must be my brain being damaged by testosterone I suppose, but I can´t see the difference…)
Another reason might be if there´s a frustration in a group, a frustration about how hard it is to change the gender hierarchy and the gender norm and the need for doing something that gives results, to get people going and keep up the spirit. To focus on an easy “enemy”, a already marginalised group as trans-women (and trans-men as well) can give the group what they need.
Or it might just be about pure anger and hate against all men. In the same way some black people are hostile towards every white person, even if they are jews or romani. Or as some muslims are hostile aginst all christians, even the ones that actually lives under opression in a hindu country. It´s stupid of course, since transwomen never experienced the full privilege of “being males” and afterwards often are being treated even worse than women. And transmen never before transitioning experiences “male privileges” and often don´t get the full “male privileges” even after transitioning. But it´s always easy to expect someone you decided to hate having more privileges than yourself, and it´s hard to hate someone who actually have as bad situation as yourself.
So what to do? You are one part of the answer. These feminist will never listen to transpeople, but they sometimes listen to cis-gendered women defining themselves as feminists. (Which, btw, sometimes is ridiculus when they give a 18-yeras-old Girl more credit than me. As I´m in my forties, has being engaged in transissues, gender issues and politics in ten years now and did live 30 year oppressed under the patriarchy as defined as woman by the society.)
But, it´s very important to realise and point out what you just did, that transpeople should have the right to define the issues and how to solve them. Cis-gendered feminist can be fantastic allies, but it´s a huge problem when they do not care abut asking trans-people about our analysis.
In fact, I consider that being a much more serious problem than the transfobic feminists. Feminists, gender theorists, GLB-activists who speak up in transissues without even bother to speak to any transperson themselvs couse the trasnmovement more damage. Because politicans will listen to them, as they seems to doing good and transpeople often are marginalised and have less access to politicans and other important decisionmakers. The transphobic feminists have no credibility in any other groups than some feministic ones.
So, thank you for your post. And thank you for adressing both the problem with transphobic feminists, and the problem with cis people using the existence of trans people as a ideological tool for their own agendas. It maked me happy and reminded me of all the very good cis gendered feminists understanding what intersectionality really is.
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Thank you. I shortened it a wee, WEE bit and got the passage on the front of a large tee shirt. It’s going up on my area rape crisis center clothesline this week. It made me feel powerful to finally have the words to tell the world: own up to your embrace of rape culture and then change it, dammit.
Someone I love made one with me. It broke my heart to see him choke up after writing on an anonymous tee shirt what he can’t tell his family about being molested as a child.
Please, keep blogging like this as long as you can do so and remain healthy.
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I think you’re being too hard on yourself.
You responded to the people who commented, and put another general reply at the end, saying that you were glad that the conversation happened and explaining why you probably wouldn’t be editing the original post. Nothing you wrote in response made it seem — well, to me, as an outside observer, anyway — that you were refusing to take sides. And you wrote another post as a follow-up and an apology, too. You didn’t want to just edit your posts to be superficially inclusive without also making sure that you knew what you were talking about first. That’s totally reasonable, in my opinion.
Also, I think I’ve found the site you mention, and ew. Frankly, I don’t get how they got from Point A to Point B. They went from Point A right to Monty-Python-like shrieks of HALPI’MBEINGOPPRESSED without paying attention to anything you actually said. And that’s not your fault at all.
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I think I explained what I was thinking and why I was thinking it pretty well, but where I was and what I was thinking was: I don’t really get this and it’s frustrating me, so I’m going to stop trying to get this because I don’t have to — because it’s not my bag. On the continuum of “sit down and shut up, transfolk, yer botherin’ me”, I think I was pretty far to one side, whereas the unhappy post I’m referencing was pretty far to the other, but it doesn’t change the fact that I was on the continuum at all. The post I referenced was unreasonably bigoted, but unreasonable bigots get a lot of mileage out of reasonable ones. They look like a bunch of wingnuts, sure, but they could (and did) point to me and say that I was arguing for the same wingnutted principle they were — that I should be allowed to say whatever I want without thinking about transfolk, and that if transfolk or allies point this out, it’s too big a bother to deal with. It just seemed so much less wingnutted when I argued for it because I argued for it so nicely, and that’s the insiduous way that bigotry goes mainstream, along with a bunch of screaming unreasonable bigots who are hooked on to my coattails.
I don’t regret not editing my post — I still have that non-editing thing that goes beyond this — but I do regret not understanding why what I did was hurtful, and refusing to engage with the people I hurt. Yes, I responded to comments nicely, but that still doesn’t mean I engaged. Instead, it was, “Excluding me hurts me,” and I said, “Really? Let me talk about that for a while. By which I mean, let me talk about me, and how your being hurt makes me feel, because my feelings are way more relevant to engage with than yours.” I didn’t listen, and when I did apologize, I talked about how abusive it is to make other people talk in a certain way. I made everything about me and how much it sucks for me to have to deal with transfolk, instead of listening to transfolk tell me how much I make it suck to be them. It’s my right to do that — it’s my blog and my life — but there are consequences for that decision, and my privilege became most apparent when I tried to dodge them. I can ignore the way my socially trained bigotry seeps out and hurts others, and then get called out on that, or I can try to learn and listen and change myself because I believe in social justice. What I can’t do is ignore my bigotry, and then inform people that they aren’t allowed to call me out because I am different and special and believe in social justice. That’s what they were doing over on that thread, and that’s what I was doing here.
There are consequences to how much I have chosen to learn, listen, and engage, and I either have to accept those consequences or change how much I learn, listen, and engage. One of the consequences is that other bigots will identify with the level of learning, listening, and engaging I’ve decided is acceptable, and because I am a Real Blogger And All, that identification carries some ideological weight behind it. That’s a consequence I decided I was unwilling to accept, finally, so this is the beginning of difficult introspective change.
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Aha. I see what you mean.
Like Jasmine, who responded above, I think my own background of privilege probably influenced me when I was reading the original post.
I grew up in an ivory tower. I have a friend who’s trans — until I met her, I never even realized how much wingnutted (that’s an awesome word, by the way) and completely untenable bigotry trans people have to deal with. I still feel sometimes as though I’m not educated enough to talk about issues on her behalf, especially not having any firsthand idea of what it must feel like to be trans or to feel excluded just by means of pronouns. Word usage is one of those really savagely sensitive issues, and I don’t want to say something ignorant and make things worse.
You are determined not only to be analytical and honest about your mistakes, but to go to work right away changing for the better. I really admire that.
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I really like reading your thought processes here.
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Harriet, you do an excellent job at parsing all the steps cisgendered folks need to take to begin to unpack their privilege. And you get that it is not the job of Transgender folk to educate us, but rather we are to listen to them, have their backs within the feminist community, particularly Trans Women who are kicked to the curb all over the blog-o-sphere by so-called feminists.
What I adore about your blog – I need to comment MUCH MUCH MORE – is how you show other folks – namely the privileged – that unpacking privilege isn’t difficult in the sense it’s not mysterious, but it is in fact difficult. Nevertheless the challenge is not reason enough to avoid it all together.
I find in so many spaces folks privately claim to be “allies” to various marginalized communities, but the spaces they exist do not support intersectionality or smack down those who seek to dismiss it.
While I am not trans, I personally have felt erased, diminished and pretty much shut down by the feminist wing of the interwebs, which is why I stopped talking about any of this stuff and focused my online writing specifically about pop culture analysis and the pursuit of the perfect pen.
The struggle continues, indeed.
Thanks for a wonderful post, my friend.
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Again, you are amazing. You say “I don’t have a good conclusion here,” but it’s the thinking you do, and inspire us to do, that is important. “My freedom rests on the freedom of transfolk” is a powerful insight. I believe the “my” is all of us, privileged or not, and the “transfolk” is everyone who is oppressed.
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I have to say, I looked for the post, because I like to know the kinds of arguments that, if not now, then later, I will have to respond to.
I hope you don’t mind – if you do, don’t publish this comment – but I’m posting the comment I left on that post here, because just at the moment, it feels like the more places I leave the response, the better. So, here it is:
“I am a cis, bisexual, feminist, female survivor of rape. And this post and the vast majority of the comments are not merely extraordinarily ignorant but deeply offensive.
‘The Vagina Monologues’ is constantly being edited, updated, and changed to reflect current issues and concerns. One issue that Ensler chose to address was the experiences of transsexual women; she also allows transsexual performances of TVM to have script rights free, which self-identifying men cannot.
I am a strong woman who does not conform gender expectations, and yes, I’m still privileged. I’m privileged because I didn’t grow up with my own body feeling strange and foreign to me; I’m privileged because the kind of bigotry demonstrated on this post doesn’t hit me in the gut the way it would if I were transsexual, although you have succeeded in making me feel sick. The prejudice and discrimination I have faced – and there’s been a lot – doesn’t suddenly make me blind to my own cis privilege. It doesn’t mean that I dehumanise men and women who just might be better people than I am, or might be more intelligent, or might contribute more than I do to society – but even if none of that were true would _still_ deserve respect and have worth because of their humanity. No one forfeits that because they are transsexual.
And misquotation and assumption and pop psychology won’t change that. I don’t know if you’ll publish this; I don’t know whether it’ll stay published. But leave my fellow humans alone.”
Thank you for alerting me to this shitty, shitty thing.
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oh. it’s them. I found that blog some months back, and yeah. they really hate trans people and find any excuse to prove trans people are oppressing the “real feminists”
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You’re welcome? I don’t think I can say you’re welcome. That post was so gross. I really considered not mentioning anything specific so it couldn’t be googled, and I wasn’t sure if I made the right decision. I have been beating off trolls since people figured me out here. But if you found something worth thanking me about there, I’m glad.
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Good to know. The more I can do to get on their shitlist, the better. It was a cold wind blowing when I realized they saw me as an ally.
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I think it’s because I’m still quite young, and though I have obviously encountered transphobia before (I have a FTM friend), it wasn’t anything on that level. But I also knew it was only a matter of time, and I like to be prepared for the argument, because I hate to stay silent.
The other thing is that if it had been on any other topic than Vagina Monologues, I wouldn’t have looked for it, but TVM, as much as I love it, is contentious in a number of ways, and as an English student, the debate – reasonable or not – is something that I like to know about.
So yes, thank you, because I feel more informed, although also more sick than I did before.
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actually, i think your voice would be a powerful addition to the discourse. think about the fears, the external pressures, the self-awareness, the whole process. it fits into what harriet was saying about post content. ymmv of course.
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Of course they saw you as an ally because people like that (ie bigots) always assume that people “like them” are on their side. White racists assume that other whites will be racist, homophobes assume that any man who isn’t actually wearing a Lady Gaga outfit to the office is homophobic too; and trans-hating plastic feminists assume that everyone else who identifies as feminist will automatically have a hate on for trans women and men (if they even admit that trans guys exist, that is).
I’ve had similar experiences wrt race. More than once I’ve posted a link to a hateful article in the press or to an anti-racist site dealing with some aspect racism, written a damning post explicitly condemning the ideology behind whatever ghastly thing I’ve linked to, and still got a “so i herd u liek racscisms lolol rite on!!1!” from some dude called WITEPRYDE88.
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I can’t tell you how valuable and inspiring this blog has been to me. It was reading your archives which allowed me to finally call what happened in my childhood abuse, and to really start disentangling the impact it’s had on me.
Which is why I want to thank you for taking sides. For a while I was scared that the trans issue would be left, that you’d be yet another feminist blogger to not really be accountable, to um and ahh over trans issues, to not take sides. Because the other big thing I’m having to disentangle, as well as my abuse history, is my internalised transphobia, the little voice that thinks maybe these “radical feminists” have got it right, that my organs make me really a woman, that I’m just transitioning to escape from sexism… every time I look at one of those awful blogs (I knew it would be a bad idea to search for it D:) the exhausting rigmarole of self doubt begins again. It’s been reading other blogs (Questioning Transphobia, most notably, I recommend it as a starting place) that have slowly allowed me to take that apart and begin accepting myself.
It’s also good to see this taken apart in your characteristic, meandering way, your thought process so openly and thoroughly described, with a real awareness of the places you’ve fucked up. I think that’s what makes your writing so valuable to so many people, and it’s definitely been inspiring for me. I was going to volunteer for your trans no-name blogger spot, but since a trans woman already has (they’re the ones experiencing the real intersection of sexism and transphobia after all) I think I’ll save my inspiration for my own blog (you know, the one I can never get round to starting).
I’m glad you stayed on the internet, to post this, and just generally. Thanks for your writing.
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Haven’t heard from that lady yet, but it’s not a single slot — I didn’t really make that clear — and whatever she does or doesn’t write, I’m sure it won’t be the representative Borg thesis on transfolk. You are welcome to do a post as well, if you like. Let me know.
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If we were interested, how should we contact you? I can’t find an email anywhere, although it’s entirely possible I’m not looking hard enough.
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It’s on my About Me page, but I think you might have to do some reading to get there. jacobs . harriet at gmail
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Thank you for this.
(And I have a livejournal, which I used to write in a lot and just haven’t written in much lately. I mostly haven’t wanted to take the time to get my thoughts down in a form I’m willing to share publically. But if you have something specific you want a guest post about, I could probably do that. Do you have specific things about trans experience on which you’re wanting posts?)
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Not really! I asked for guest posters as part of a new thing I am doing, trying to get different voices. The No-Name Bloggers thing is very free-form (in concept, since we’ve only had one so far). I won’t publish anything that is outside the bounds of decency here — as in, if you wanted to write an article about how fat people who get abortions are secretly whores who should get a sense of humor, that wouldn’t fly — but outside of that, anything goes. I might need to firm that up. People seem to have trouble with it being that free-form, but that’s where it is right now.
If you wanted to write about what it’s like to get on a feminist blog and be like, “Oh, awesome, I love this feminist blog… oh, wait, this is apparently one of those feminist spaces I’m not allowed to exist in, NOW WHAT,” that’d probably be topically relevant.
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Did you find the trans blogger to make a post? I’d like tos ee it.
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@Z: Nope, not yet.
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Oh, well, I think I count. I’m trans, have maybe 3 readers not including my partner, and 70% of my comments are spam. I could do a post if you’re still interested- is there anything you wanted in particular?
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